


Any Ending That May Seem To Come

by Wojelah



Category: Dark Is Rising Sequence - Susan Cooper
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-05-05
Updated: 2014-05-05
Packaged: 2018-01-22 00:52:58
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,948
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1569941
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Wojelah/pseuds/Wojelah
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It's not all that hard, once she gets started.  She's a folkorist, an archivist.  She's used to reading stories.  And Annie loves her parents, but she's also in her fifties, long past the realization that they were people in their own right, with their own lives, their own stories.  </p><p>By the time she's halfway through the pile, she's immersed.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Any Ending That May Seem To Come

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Gramarye](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Gramarye/gifts).
  * Inspired by [Dark Is Rising Drabbles](https://archiveofourown.org/works/310673) by [Gramarye](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Gramarye/pseuds/Gramarye). 



> With a lovely collection of drabbles to pull from, I used several - Crunch Time and An Evening of Fun, specifically, and the general theme of the _Eiras_ drabbles and fics.

When their Da passes, it's hard. Harder still that they'll never have his body to mourn properly, but then, they grew up in Wales, by the sea, on the shore, for at least part of every year, and it's not the first time they've seen her take a person and leave nothing but shattered, empty wood and canvas behind. He'd been nearly eighty-five, after all, and missing their mother terribly. And he'd never taken Uncle Bran's loss well, and then to lose Uncle Simon and Uncle James, not long after, well. It had been hard, everyone knew. And then to lose Mum, well. 

It had been a clear day. The squall had come from nowhere. He’d been spry and able, but he hadn’t been up to a storm. And isn’t that how the story always goes, after all.

\---

Clearing out has to wait for summer. She's a professor, and the University's been generous with bereavement leave, but there are still lectures to hold and exams to administer and graduate students to beleaguer. So it's not till late June that she pulls up to the little cottage that had been their summer house, frees the cats from their carriers, and takes a first walk around the place before she begins the slow process of clearing out. 

She doesn't mind that she's on her own. Michael's on assignment in some godforsaken place, and she watches the news only long enough to see his face, hear his voice, before switching it off. He emails every other day. She'd rather hear it in his own, unedited words than the ones on the telly. Kate's not far, at least as the crow flies in the modern world, but she's just had her second, and a tiny cottage on the Welsh coast is not the easiest place to bring a colicky three-month old. She calls every morning, once the baby's down to nap and David's off at kindergarten. 

Her siblings would be there if they could. She knows that, in her bones, just like she knows they'll always be thick as thieves, even with the distance between them. She doesn't mind being the one to do this. Doesn't mind doing it alone.

\---

The first week is easy enough - easy and hard in the way of grieving someone with a full life behind them. It's packing sweaters and opening closets and deciding how many wooden spoons she should take back to Cardiff and how many she ought to put in the box for donation. It's finding that her Da never had gone through her Mum's things, no matter his protests, and giving herself the leisure for a good cry and a cuppa. She misses him, his wry smile and his gentle hands his eyes that always seemed a little far away. 

The day she thinks she sees her Da on the hillside, a familiar, slightly bent figure, flat cap on his head, bracing against the summer breeze that's really more of a wind, she admits that while alone may be fine, getting out of the house may only be for the best. She drives down the narrow road that ends in the village and settles into a cozy spot for a pint. They know her face, after all. And they know she likes stories. They're happy to share them, if she asks.

It's a good evening.

\---

There's a desk full of papers in the study that she can't quite bring herself to touch. It's the only thing left to do, and it needs doing soon. She's been here six weeks - she'll have to be going back home soon. The new term is coming, and she has emails and syllabi and the mundanity of politics in the chronically underfunded world of academia to navigate. She says as much to Kate, one lovely July morning, the grass so green it glows under the bluest sky. "Time to leave fairyland, at any rate. I can't imagine how much time will have passed when I get back."

"Six weeks," her sister says prosaically. "The fairies never did cart you away, for all you spend your time writing about them." 

"Was supposed to be your job," Annie retorts. "But you were never interested in the role of youngest child, so someone had to step in to make sure the story ran its course. Enter the responsible eldest." 

Kate just laughs, and then the baby cries, and they say their goodbyes. "Shall we keep it, do you think?" is the last thing Kate asks before she rings off. Annie doesn't know. She supposes they ought to sell. The location alone would mean a pretty sum. She's single and a folklore professor - she certainly couldn't afford to buy her siblings out of it. But selling just seems... wrong.

She looks up, then, and she thinks she sees her Da. Again. It's the third time this week. 

She shakes her head and goes for her keys. She needs milk, and the cats need food, and the rest will keep till tomorrow.

\---

Two days later, it pours. 

She turns the light on and spends the morning on the couch with a book, but she knows the desk is there, and by noon, she can't really ignore it and longer. She pushes back the curtains and turns on the desk lamp, and an hour or two later, she's taken a solid pile of old paper out to the bins. When she comes back, she looks at the stack of old pictures and correspondence and looks at the bookshelves and opts for the easier path. She starts with the shelf by the door.

\---

There's a lot she wants to keep. Da might have been a professor of anthropology, but there's enough overlap between his specialty and hers that she's definitely keeping his source material. She'd come to visit a time or two for that exact purpose anyway, before. She'll have to mail at least some of it - that or the cats will be extremely unhappy on the drive back. 

It's not till she's well past Da's shelves and into the ones that had been her mother's bailiwick that she finds the little green-bound journal. She knows what it is as soon as she sees it - she's got a stack of them, years and years, that she'd pulled from her mother's bedside table. Her mother hadn't written every day, or even very much, but she'd kept them, year after year, to record the important things. Births. Celebrations. Losses. Deaths. Annie can remember being little and seeing her own name, written down - birthdate, time, length and weight. They'd had a tradition, till she'd left for university, of writing an entry together every year, on her birthday.

She sets it with the correspondence and finishes the shelves. That's enough of the study for the day, Annie thinks, and closes the door behind her.

\---

The storm blows through late that night.

It wakes her up with a crash, and she's too startled to roll over and fall back asleep. She makes a cup of cocoa - she's always found it comforting when she's unsettled. She wanders through the house, fingers wrapped around warm ceramic, and ends up in the study. The curtains are still open and the lightning over the hill is spectacular to watch. By the time it passes, she's accepted that sleep isn't coming any time soon. Annie sets the cup down and picks up the stack of papers.

\---

It's not all that hard, once she gets started. She's a folkorist, an archivist. She's used to reading stories. And Annie loves her parents, but she's also in her fifties, long past the realization that they were people in their own right, with their own lives, their own stories. 

By the time she's halfway through the pile, she's immersed.

\---

 _Photograph, undated_

Her parents look like children, settled on a hillside. They _are_ children, brown-cheeked and glowing and exuberant at the end of their holiday. Mum and Uncle Simon and Uncle Barney and Uncle Bran are draped over each other, grinning ear to ear. Her mother’s holding up a dark stone, showing it to the camera, even as Uncle Bran reaches for it. 

Da’s kneeling behind them, leaning on her mother’s brothers. His grin is just as wide, but his eyes are dark. If it weren’t her own Da, if she hadn’t just seen him through those losses, maybe she’d never had wondered. But he looks so sad to her, like he had after leaving Uncle Bran for the last time, and she wonders. 

_Photographs, undated, stuck together_

In the first, they’re in fancy dress. Her mother is stunning, laced into a Victorian confection that makes her look nearly ethereal even though her smile at the camera is a little nervous. But her Da, now. The cravat, the vest, the cut of the jacket - he looks like more than a young man dressed for a party. He wears it with a confidence, gaze direct at the camera. He looks like he _belongs._

In the second, her mum's head is down, bent furiously over a book as she scribbled away. The desk lamp is casting a halo over tiny print and tinier footnotes. The back, in her Da's hand, says "Jane, Jana, Juno, Jane."

_Photograph, annotated “To Dr. and Mrs. Will Stanton, with love, Barney”_

It’s her parents’ first dance at their wedding. Annie knows because she’s seen the other pictures, careful tucked into her mother’s album. They’re a handsome couple - they always were, even at the end. Uncle Barney must have taken it, Annie guesses. He’d been an excellent amateur photographer, and this has something of his style about it. Uncle Max had urged him to mix media, put his two loves together, but Barney had said, “I do it for love. It wouldn’t be fun if it paid the bills.” And then the adults would laugh, and the conversation would turn to other things.

He had a good eye, though. Her parents are so clearly enamored, heads bowed together, just touching. The paid photographer had caught that much. But Uncle Barney had caught the tension in her Da’s arms, and the faint line of worry around her mother’s eyes. Her mum’s whispering in Da’s ear, and Annie wonders what she’s saying, whether it helped.

_Photographs, undated, paper-clipped together_

The second picture, she’s seen. A copy of it used to hang on the wall - Michael asked for it, and she’d mailed it to him without hesitation. Uncle Bran and Da, older, looking tired, arms slung round each others’ shoulders, lifting a glass. She knows it’s not long after Bran was appointed to the Ministry. 

She doesn’t remember the first picture at all. It’s her uncle and her father again, but looking so worn, so tired, she wishes she could reach out and hug them, even after all these years. They clearly don’t know they’re observed. They’re sitting by a fire, across from each other, deep in conversation. Uncle Bran’s jaw is set, his mouth is hard. Her father’s reaching over to him, leaning over, elbows on his knees, looking up, saying something. Bran looks like nothing so much as an eagle, or an ancient king, straight-backed and chin up, the fire aglow behind him, but she can see the whiteness of his knuckles where they grip the armrest. 

Bran had been a consummate politician, and politics was never easy. “Ah, dewin,” she can still hear her uncle say, one particularly difficult year. “We need the old days come again to fix this mess.” 

“What we have is you,” her father had said. Annie still remembers the look on his face, and she still doesn’t know what it was.

\---

_Prayer cards, two, one for Bran Davies, one for Jane Stanton_

She’s held both of these before. They’re not traditional prayers. Not by a long shot. “But then,” her Da had said when they’d asked about her Mum’s, “we never have gone much by tradition.”

“Terrible thing to say to the child of an anthropologist, Da,” Annie had answered. “Especially when she herself studies the fairies.” He’d laughed. It had been watery and a little forced, but she’d taken it.

Bran had picked his own. _Time does not die, Time has neither beginning nor end, and so nothing can end or die that has once had a place in Time._ “A very wise man told him that,” her Da had said. They’d been visiting his grave, weeks later. “A very wise man, and a very foolish one.”

Her mother’s had said only, _Y maent yr mynyddoedd yn canu, ac y mae’r arglwyddes yn dod._ She speaks enough Welsh to know what it says. She’d always intended to ask what it meant. She never had.

They didn’t have a card for Da’s service. They hadn’t known what to say.

\---

It’s nearing 3 am when Annie picks up the little green book, the one from the library, kept apart from the rest. When she puts it down, she understands why. For years, there are fragments. Snatches of dreams, jotted questions, the excerpts and comments and scraps of unexplained moments. 

They’re all whispers and pieces - a grail, a Lady, a rose-colored stone. Merriman Lyon and afancs and a train racing against time. There are poems and fragments that all read like the edges of a story Annie hasn’t heard yet, until she reads the last pages. They’re covered in tiny print, a fragile, slightly shaky hand. _I remember,_ her mother says, on pages untouched for years, and they are a story that takes her breath away and leaves her stunned. 

_Will thinks I am sleeping,_ her mother writes. _And yes, I have been. But I am old now, and I think, like Bran, I am dying, and so now, when I dream, I remember._

_And at least I know, before I leave him, that these things are true. I wrote down them because I dreamed them, or remembered them, which is nearly the same thing, and I dreamed them because I lived them._

_I suppose I should be angry to have been made to forget. And perhaps I am. But it was crueler to him, who will miss us so when we are gone, and who will not even have those memories to share. And so, I think, I am angry for him too. He does not have the luxury, so I will do it for him._

_Will, my love, I know you will read this. I know you have known about my little dream book since I started it all those years ago. I know there was nothing to be done. That all you have ever been allowed to do is serve. And I know that I love you, not just the part that belongs to the Light, but even that, too, now._

\---

Her father is there when she closes the book.

Outside, the dawn is lightening the sky. 

He’s on the sofa by the fireplace, where she’d sat so often, reading while he worked, or awaiting a lecture for some childhood misadventure. He looks just as she had seen him on the hill, just as she had seen him the last time before he died. Or didn’t, she amends.

She wants to shout. She wants to demand answers, but she realizes that here, in this pocket of time, she knows them, or at least the important ones. She wants to run to him and hug him and have him be her father, not the ancient being that is looking at her out of his face.

Instead, she lifts the book and holds it out to him. “I think she meant this to go with you,” Annie says.

And then it is her father, and the tears in his eyes are very real, and she is rounding the desk to hold him tight, her head in his lap, one last time, as the light in the room grows brighter.

“She did,” her Da says at last. He’s stroking her back, and she knows his hands are not shaking from infirmity. “And with your blessing, I’ll take it.”

She lifts her head then, looking up, because she is the daughter of both her parents, and she knows about stories - and about their story. “Take all of it, you mean,” she says. 

“I do,” he says, and tucks a lock of hair behind her ear. “From you as well.”

She says nothing. 

“Oh, my dear,” her Da murmurs. “I can’t ask you not to be angry.”

“I’m not,” Annie answers, and though it’s automatic, she’s surprised to realize it’s also true. “I do understand.”

“My girl,” Will Stanton says to her, the last thing he says to her, as the sun crests the hill and the room is briefly full of white and gold.

\---

The light makes her blink, and then Annie’s aware that she’s cold and stiff and sitting on the floor. She must have dozed off, reading. Or, she amends, realizing the papers are still on the desk, gotten so tired she’d just decided to lie down where she was. She stands, stiffly, and rubs at the crick in her neck. 

She’s gotten through everything now. The study’s done. A few more days of mailing and packing, and she’ll be ready to head back. She doesn’t want to sell, though. That’s important. She’ll work it out with Kate and Michael.

It’s going to be a lovely day, Annie thinks, looking out the window, over the hillside. She yawns, and decides she’s earned the comfort of bed and a lie-in. She sees a figure in the distance, small and dark - an early hiker, she thinks, and waves. It waves back, and she smiles, and turns away.


End file.
